Review:AT&T U-Verse

Contributor

Ok,
So this is less of a super-drawn out review that re-lists the features/services that we can all Bing or Google, and more of just our personal experience with AT&T U-Verse.

For background, we moved from living as expats for a few years. While abroad, we used a mix of Free Other the Air (Satellite) and various streaming options for our TV needs. When we moved back, the Mrs. was coming on being due with our latest little one and did not want to wait for me to figure out other options for TV...so....we went there first with Cox.
Needless to say, about 10 mos later, and not too impressed. At the time, I was reading all the propaganda...er marketing about AT&T U-Verse, and just didn't trust it would work as advertised (and had no friends who used the service).
Fast forward when we're upgrading one of the phones, and the salesperson made it worth our while to try out the U-Verse TV.
So far, 14 mos later, the Mrs. and kids are happy. The service generally has most sports that I watch on it, and I'm slowly figuring out the various features that come with our TV package. Ending price beats what we were paying Cox for TV and Cable by about $50 USD a month.
Things I Like about the Combined U-Verse Services:
- The WiFi TV box is just as the commercial advertises. In the Aug-November months of football season, we would take the box and TV out of our bedroom and put it on the back patio to watch while grilling out. Same quality of service as the living room.

- 4 tuner DVR boxes. Cox had the old school dual tuner, which in 2014 just doesn't work for a DVR family. Even with 4, it can be tight some nights depending on what all we've programmed. WE're more of a record and watch when we want to watch type of group which does not apply to everyone. I couldn't tell you what the "regular" night is for most shows that I watch...

- Dual Frequency WiFi:
Our setup runs on 802.11N, one freq for TV (2 x WIFi boxes), and one for Internet. No real complaints. I see no impact on TV quality of service over the WiFi boxes (we live in a two story home). The Internet can slow at times, but I've never had an outage problem that I've noticed, so I guess I'll take always up over the occasional having to wait 3 seconds vice 1 for my favorite web page to load (could be my computer as well).

- New TV App:
Is pretty good. Have optested on my phone and my son's tablet. You do have to look up your super, secret @att.net email address that I have never used, and to be honest forgot my account had assigned until asked to enter it to make the app work. App is free, use of the App just costs you bandwidth (free on your WiFi, cost on 4G, etc).

Things I Don't Like About AT&T U-Verse:
- Not too much. I guess the Internet speed could use a tad bit of work, but I do a fair amount of computer/web development at home and it doesn't really hold me up. It could also be a device-cap issue since we have so many freaking mobile-this-that and the others in the home across 5 people that use the router.
- Paying too many bills to AT&T

Things I've Heard Others Complain about AT&T U-Verse:
- Primarily about their customer service, or lack there of. We have never had a need to call, so I can't speak to this from our end. We had our service set-up via brick-n-mortar AT&T store (who were motivated to get their commissions off of us), so we were all pretty comfortable about what we were getting before had.

Think that's it for now. Please share if you have any experiences good or bad with these folks.

Contributor

Great review. So the DVR boxes from AT&T were much better than what you had from Cox? One of my main complaints with cable and satellite is how slow the menu and channel guide is when paging through things. How is AT&T's DVR with GUI speed? The DVR is one of my most important features before I subscribe to any pay TV service.

Contributor

@Aaron62,
Oh yeah, about 1000% better. I also like being able to watch the DVR playback in our bedroom on the wireless box as well as our main TV viewing room (the living room).

Although kind of revolutionary when I first had Cox a million years ago, the lack of GUI upgrades, slowness, and non-updates to the Guide since then just made it feel like I was paying for a sports car but enjoying the performance of a Pinto....

It took my neighbors moving in who were bit AT&T fans to convince me to try them out. If you go there, I definitely recommend seeing how good you can do online, then go into the local AT&T store. I got the feeling that they got a pretty good cut for TV sales in the store. To the tune that we got several 2-300 dollar rebate cards after being customers for 2 months (they promised the cards at sign-up).

Similar to Cox, you can pay for movies on demand if you are too lazy to drive to Red Box or subscribe to Red Box streaming (occasionally we are), but everything else is just faster and slicker.

I have read the odd thing about how Cox is supposedly upgrading their services on the West coast, but I do not know any humans who currently use them now.

DTVUSA Member

I personally love at&t u-verse. I wish I could get it again, but for right now, we just can't. But we will get there. I have recommended at&t u-verse to a few other people I know and they seem to really like it as well. I really like there internet part of it tho. That is my main thing. Considering I seem to be on the internet about 94% of the day. If I am not on it, I am normally out getting everything I have to get done for the day.

Contributor

Well, after your "good deal" runs out with AT&T, they will jack the bill up (clearly says this in the fine print on line 75 on the reverse of the PDF version of your bill that you may or may not read...I called up and said right, I'm switching to either a Roku or DirecTV if you don't do something about this...after asking for the supervisor of the supervisor...not only is my bill back to normal, but now I'm seeing 19Mbs down as compared to the 10 I was getting before!

Contributor

@Aaron62,
Oh yeah, about 1000% better. I also like being able to watch the DVR playback in our bedroom on the wireless box as well as our main TV viewing room (the living room).

Although kind of revolutionary when I first had Cox a million years ago, the lack of GUI upgrades, slowness, and non-updates to the Guide since then just made it feel like I was paying for a sports car but enjoying the performance of a Pinto....

It took my neighbors moving in who were bit AT&T fans to convince me to try them out. If you go there, I definitely recommend seeing how good you can do online, then go into the local AT&T store. I got the feeling that they got a pretty good cut for TV sales in the store. To the tune that we got several 2-300 dollar rebate cards after being customers for 2 months (they promised the cards at sign-up).

Similar to Cox, you can pay for movies on demand if you are too lazy to drive to Red Box or subscribe to Red Box streaming (occasionally we are), but everything else is just faster and slicker.

I have read the odd thing about how Cox is supposedly upgrading their services on the West coast, but I do not know any humans who currently use them now.

DTVUSA Member

Ya, I noticed the bill increase. But, our next door neighbor has AT&T U-Verse for the last 3 years and her bill is only like 30.00$, which I have yet to figure out why. Haven't asked her, considering I don't want to seem noisy.